Maiden moved to his daughter's bed and sat heavily on the edge of it. “You've not met Nancy before this, have you, Tommy?” “Not that I recall.”
“She means nothing but well, that woman. She gives, and she gives. But there are times when I can't take any longer.” He looked down at his hands. He flexed his fingers. He raised then dropped his hands to gesture with as he went on. “She was worried about me. Can you credit it? She wanted to help. All she could think about—or talk about or do something about—was getting this numbness out of my hands. All yesterday afternoon she was after me about them. All last night as well.”
“Perhaps it's her way of coping,” Lynley said.
“But it takes too much concentration for her to cut out the thoughts that she's trying to cut out, d'you see that? It takes every ounce of concentration she has. And I found that I couldn't breathe with her round me. Hovering there. Offering cups of tea and heat pads and … I began to feel like my skin wasn't even my own, like she couldn't rest till she'd even managed to invade my pores in order to—” He paused abruptly and in that pause he seemed to evaluate everything he'd said, unguarded, because his next words were hollow. “God. Listen to me. Selfish bastard.”
“You've been dealt a death blow. You're trying to cope.”
“She's been dealt the blow as well. But she thinks of me.” He kneaded one hand with the fingers of the other. “She wanted to massage them. That's all it was, really. And God forgive me, but I drove her off because I thought I'd suffocate if I stayed in the room with her a moment longer. And now … How can we need and love and loathe all at once? What's happening to us?”
The aftershocks of brutality are happening to you, Lynley wanted to reply. But instead he repeated, “Has she gone out to Calder Moor, Andy?”
“She'll be on Hathersage Moor. It's closer. A few miles. The other … ? No. She won't be on Calder.”
“Has she ever ridden there?”
“On Calder?”
“Yes. On Calder Moor. Has she ever ridden there?”
“Of course she has. Yes.”
Lynley hated to do so, but he had to ask. Indeed, he owed it both to himself and to his Buxton colleague to ask: “You as well, Andy? Or just your wife?”
Andy Maiden looked up slowly at this, as if finally seeing the road they were travelling. He said, “I thought you were pursuing the London angle. SO 10. And what goes along with SO 10.”
“I am pursuing SO 10. But I'm after the truth, all of the truth. As you are, I expect. Do both of you ride on Calder Moor?”
“Nancy's not—”
“Andy, help me out. You know what the job's like. The facts generally come out one way or another. And sometimes the how of their coming out becomes more intriguing than the facts themselves.
That can easily divert an otherwise simple investigation, and I can't believe you want that.”
Maiden understood: An attempt at obfuscation could ultimately become more arresting than the information one sought to withhold. “Both of us ride on Calder Moor. All of us, in fact. But it's too far to bike there from here, Tommy.”
“How many miles?”
“I don't know exactly. But far, too far. We take the bikes out in the Land-Rover when we want to ride there. We park in a lay-by. Or in one of the villages. But we don't ride all the way to Calder Moor from here.” He canted his head in the direction of the bedroom window, adding, “The Land Rover's still out there. She won't have gone onto Calder this afternoon.”
Not this afternoon, Lynley thought. He said, “I did see a Land Rover when I came through the car park.”
Maiden hadn't been a police officer for thirty years without being capable of a simple act of mind reading. He said, “Running the Hall's a demanding life. It drains our time. We take our exercise when we can. If you want to track her on Hathersage Moor, there's a map in Reception that'll show you the way.”
That wouldn't be necessary, Lynley told him. If Nancy Maiden had ridden her bike out onto the moors, she probably was seeking some time alone. He was happy enough to let her have it.